I'm in the market for a replacement hard drive for one of my laptops. Don't need a lot of space because it's just one of my plink around Linux boxes but my brother suggested I invest in an SSD drive. I haven't looked into how far SSD drives have come since they were first introduced into market so I was wondering what you folks out there had in mind if you were in the market for a 2.5" SATA SSD drive? I'm only looking for anywhere between 150 - 250 gigabytes and I don't really have a budget for it so I can't say what I consider too expensive.

I can read reviews on Amazon and Newegg all day but ultimately, I trust my fellow Spiceheads. So... what should I look for in a drive? Any manufacturers to steer clear from?

Thanks in advance

EDIT: Thank you so much for all the input. I ended up going with the Samsung - 840 Pro 128GB Internal Serial ATA Solid State Drive and have put a fresh copy of Ubuntu ﻿12.04 LTS 64-bit. All told this laptop has indeed reached a point of new life and works rather well. I'm getting 5 second boot times but then again, I can't quite use that as a scale just yet as it's a fresh copy of the OS and will of course boot faster with only the bare basics installed thus far.

IMO, any of the makers of flash are good choices, except for the remaining stocks of Crucial V4s. They know a thing or two about the NAND being used, and serve major OEMs. I'm partial to Crucial, due to low cost with their good support, should I ever need it.

The likes of Kingston, PNY, AData, Transced, OWC, and others, primarily either rebrand a major OEM SSD, like a cheaper Tobisha, or are just buying NAND and putting it together with a Sandforce controller, and don't have any particular knowledge of what's going on inside. Corsair has some models that are exceptions. For similar money, why not go the sources of the storage itself?

While not as mature as HDDs by a long shot, SSDs have a long way in the last few years, and are certainly reliable enough for your main storage. The main issue is that if one does go south, it will tend to do so catastrophically more often than an HDD will, so the old, "oh, it's clicking and buzzing, I guess I need to back my data up," laziness won't work.

Using Linux especially, this will be the start of converting all of your primary storage to SSDs, keeping HDDs only for their GB per dollar. It will not be a minor upgrade.

Newegg has had a lot of SSDs on sale recently. I got my Samsung 840 EVO's for a little over $100, (not sure what your budget is).

The vast selection at Newegg is somewhat of a reason why I started this discussion. Since I've never purchased SSD drives and the last time I even looked at them was when the tech was first introduced, I figured I'd get some Spice feedback.

Budget... I don't really have a budget, per say. Since the laptop in question with a failed drive is one that someone gave me I wasn't sure how much coin I wanted to spend. See, I usually help people out with IT'ish support needs for free if they're a decent human. Jerks get charged and most times refused. So in exchange they usually give me their old equipment which I amass in my garage then when someone less fortunate is in need I piece together what I can and help them out.

With this laptop it's "decent" in the way of specs but I just run either Linux or ChromeOS on it and it sits on the coffee table. With that, I wasn't sure if I wanted to just slap in an old SATA drive I had laying around or get an SSD to see how much of an improvement I get. Someone suggested SSD so I figured I'd at least check it out. It's just rough spending too much dough on a hard drive for an old laptop just to try out a new technology when I have spare drives laying around.

So far, looking at the prices, I'm comfortable with the $100 price range but it looks like I'm going to have to spend a bit more to get something above 100GB in capacity.

Indeed that seems to be the popular line of drives among SSD adopters but although I'd like to stay with the Samsung brand I'm trying to debate on going with a maybe lesser known or alternative brand to get the drive with the capacity I want down more in my sub $150 price range. Thank you for the suggestion.

Indeed that seems to be the popular line of drives among SSD adopters but although I'd like to stay with the Samsung brand I'm trying to debate on going with a maybe lesser known or alternative brand to get the drive with the capacity I want down more in my sub $150 price range. Thank you for the suggestion.

IMO, any of the makers of flash are good choices, except for the remaining stocks of Crucial V4s. They know a thing or two about the NAND being used, and serve major OEMs. I'm partial to Crucial, due to low cost with their good support, should I ever need it.

The likes of Kingston, PNY, AData, Transced, OWC, and others, primarily either rebrand a major OEM SSD, like a cheaper Tobisha, or are just buying NAND and putting it together with a Sandforce controller, and don't have any particular knowledge of what's going on inside. Corsair has some models that are exceptions. For similar money, why not go the sources of the storage itself?

While not as mature as HDDs by a long shot, SSDs have a long way in the last few years, and are certainly reliable enough for your main storage. The main issue is that if one does go south, it will tend to do so catastrophically more often than an HDD will, so the old, "oh, it's clicking and buzzing, I guess I need to back my data up," laziness won't work.

Using Linux especially, this will be the start of converting all of your primary storage to SSDs, keeping HDDs only for their GB per dollar. It will not be a minor upgrade.

Fantastic... thank you for the information. This is the great kind of Spicehead response I look for. Good show my friend.

With this info (as well as some other suggestions) I'll start doing some hard research this weekend and hopefully order soon.

I am very satisfied with the two Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB drives I have. When compared to Crucial M500 960 GB (which I also own) the EVO's have faster reads and writes plus the included Magician software makes it really easy to configure Windows for the type of performance a person would want: max performance, max capacity or max reliability.

I know in my comment I said that I used Ubuntu but for some reason those 5 second boot times slowly started turning into halted boot screens and sometimes 20 second boot times. I didn't want to mess with it since this laptop was rarely getting used and just sat beside the couch so I went with Linux Mint. From power button to fully functional GUI I'm getting about 7 second boot times. I think the Samsung 840 Pro was a great purchase and again, I thank you all for your input.